Monday, December 21, 2015

Netanyahu. Transcript. 37th Zionist Congress. 20 Oct 2015.

The 37th Zionist Congress is currently convening in
Jerusalem, with 525 delegates from all over the world. Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu addressed the opening of the Congress:

We’ve witnessed a lot of changes since the last
Congress, great challenges and great opportunities for Israel and the Jewish
people. We are now, despite our desires and our efforts for peace and for
tranquility, we are now in the midst of a campaign, an assault, and not the
first one, that seeks to murder Israelis wherever they are. And this campaign
is incorporating medieval ideology with modern technology. It’s a unique
combination.

I am seeing it primarily on the social networks. I’ll
talk about it in a minute. And we know for example that the various attackers
are using their Facebook pages to indicate what they are, to absorb messages of
incitement. I appreciate the fact that Facebook is trying to find the balance
between free speech and the safety of the public. I think that warrants special
attention in this case.

Now let me try to put in perspective what it is we’re
fighting: We’re fighting not only a campaign of physical assaults on the Jewish
state - the Jewish people have experienced that throughout the centuries - but
as we’ve experienced in our history, the physical assaults on the Jews are
always preceded and accompanied by an assault on the truth, campaign of
defamation and slander. And what I would like to examine with you today are the
ten big lies that are hurled at us. And the only way that you can fight lies, and
especially big lies, is to puncture them with the simple truth.

So here’s the first big lie: Israel
is trying to change the status quo on the Temple Mount. No, we’re not. We
haven’t changed the status quo on the Temple Mount in years. There’s a simple arrangement:
Muslims visit the Temple Mount and they pray there. Others, Jews, Christians
and other denominations, secular people, they come - secular people pray too by
the way - they visit the Temple Mount but they don’t. Sunday to Thursday, 7:00
to 11:00, the non-Muslims visit. Muslims visit the rest of the time. How many
Muslims have visited and prayed on the Temple Mount, on average, last year?
Anybody know? No, not 300,000, three and a half million. Eighty thousand
Christians and other denominations and 12,000 Jews. That hasn’t changed.

Though the Temple Mount is our holiest site - it was
built there by king Solomon 3,000 years ago, 1,500 years before the birth of
Islam - though we’ve been attached to it for 3 millennia, we in no way deny the
sacred sites or the rights or the free access for other denominations, and
Israel has not and will not change the status quo. This is one huge lie.

The second is not only
that we seek to change the prayer arrangements on the Temple Mount and the
non-prayer arrangements on the Temple Mount, which we don’t, is that we seek to
destroy the al-Aqsa Mosque. Now this is particularly farcical. It would be
farcical if it weren’t tragic. My grandfather came to this land in 1920 and he
landed in Jaffa, and very shortly after he landed he went to the immigration
office in Jaffa. And a few months later it was burned down by marauders. These
attackers, Arab attackers, murdered several Jews, including our celebrated
writer Brenner.

And this attack and other
attacks on the Jewish community in 1920, 1921, 1929, were instigated by a call
of the Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini, who was later sought for war
crimes in the Nuremberg trials because he had a central role in fomenting the
final solution. He flew to Berlin. Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews
at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews. And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to
Hitler and said, “If you expel them, they’ll all come here.” “So what should I
do with them?” he asked. He said, “Burn them.” And he was sought in, during the
Nuremberg trials for prosecution. He escaped it and later died of cancer, after
the war, died of cancer in Cairo. [Fucking Amazing.] But this is what
Haj Amin al-Husseini said. He said, “:The Jews seek to destroy the Temple
Mount.” My grandfather in 1920 seeks to destroy…? Sorry, the al-Aqsa Mosque. So
this lie is about a hundred years old. It fomented many, many attacks. The
Temple Mount stands. The al-Aqsa Mosque stands. But the lie stands too,
persists.

First lie: Israel seeks to change the status quo -
false. Second lie: Israel seeks to destroy the al-Aqsa Mosque - false. It’s
particularly onerous because Israel is the only country that protects the holy
sites in the Middle East. You see Muslims, the militant Shi’ites and the
militant Sunnis, blowing each other’s mosques to smithereens across Iraq,
Syria, you name it, churches - of course, synagogues - don’t even talk about
it. And ancient shrines of great world heritage - blown up. The only place
where the holy shrines of all are absolutely guaranteed is in Jerusalem under
Israeli sovereignty and of course in the rest of Israel.

Here’s lie number three -
the reason you have this surge of violence is because there has been a surge in
settlement construction. Did you hear this? Yeah, all the time. Well, here are
the numbers - some of you are not going to like them. In my first term in
office, we built an average of 3,000 units annually in Judea and Samaria. In
Barak’s single year, he built 5,000. In Sharon, it was down to 1,900. In
Olmert, it was down to 1,700. And given the circumstances, in my successive
terms it’s down to 1,500.

There are reasons for that. We can discuss that some
other time but facts are facts. These numbers are exact. So, far from seeing a
settlement surge, there’s actually been a decline in construction. I raise that
because this is raised again and again and again. The Palestinians are
protesting because of a surge in settlement activity. Sorry, not true. And I
put the facts forward before the world. Some surge.

The fourth big lie is
that we are executing Palestinians - executing Palestinians. When our people
are fighting back against these knife-wielders, meat-cleaver-wielders, people
who try hack to death our citizens and our soldiers and our policemen, they’re
executing people. And what was the example? Ahmed Mansara, this boy that Abu
Mazen put forward. He held his picture and he said we’re executing this
innocent boy. He’s not innocent, he nearly stabbed to death, he stabbed nearly
to death a 13-year-old Israeli boy riding on a bicycle.

He’s not dead. He’s been released, I think he’s about
to be released, from the Hadassah Hospital where his victim is struggling for
his life. This is a big lie that we punctured right on the spot. Because here’s
the thing about the lies that I’m describing: If left unchallenged, they
continue to expand like a cloud and by dint of constant repetition, these lies
assume the cache of self-evident truth. And I think it’s vital to put the facts
before the world.

The fifth point is
that Israel uses excessive force in general. That’s not true either. What do
you think would happen on the streets of New York? Let’s just imagine the NYPD
and people are rushing in the streets trying to knife down their police or
innocent passers-by. What would the police do in New York City or in Paris or
in Moscow or anywhere else? You know exactly what they would do. And this is
what our police force is doing. To those who question our use of force, I would
ask: How would you respond to it? How would your police respond to it? And our
instructions are very clear. If there’s a threat to life, either to the police
officer or to innocent civilians, take action to neutralize it. Half the
terrorists are killed; half the terrorists are apprehended; one terrorist
escaped.

The sixth lie is that
the reason we have this increase is not only a surge in settlements, it’s the
stagnation in the peace process. Well, some of the worst terrorism that Israel
has experienced in its history occurred when the peace process was at its peak.
We’ve had terrorism when there was a peace process. We’ve had terrorism when
there was no peace process. We’ve had terrorism when there was an Israel. We’ve
had terrorism when there was no Israel. We’ve had terrorism when there were
settlements. We’ve had terrorism when there were no settlements, when we didn’t
even control Judea and Samaria.

The real reason we have this terrorism is not because
the terrorists are frustrated in the peace process. They’re frustrated because
there’s a State of Israel and that frustration will continue.

The seventh myth is
that Abbas is a moderate. Abbas does not send his security forces to attack us,
this is true. And there is ongoing cooperation; that is true too. So on one
hand, Abbas does what I’ve just described, but on the other hand, he is a
steady inciter. He incites all the time. He and his Fatah partners and the
official websites of the Palestinian Authority incite day in and day out on
those social networks. And to put a fine point on it, he said the other day, “I
welcome every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem.” Are these the words of a
moderate? He glorifies these killers.

He hasn’t condemned a single one of the 30 terrorist
attacks on Israelis over the last month. And I think that people who call
public squares in the name of mass murderers should be condemned. I haven’t
heard a word of condemnation, practically not a syllable of condemnation for
this irresponsible behavior of Abbas. And I think what we should tell Abu Mazen
is: Stop lying, stop inciting.

The eighth big lie is
that only international observers will restore calm on the Temple Mount. The
last thing we have to do is to take the most explosive square kilometer on
earth and put there the General Assembly of the United Nations. That is not a
force for moderation. Israel enforces the status quo and we should tell the
truth, affirm Israel’s proven commitment to the status quo and hold President
Abbas, Hamas and the Islamic Movement in Israel accountable for their lies and
incitement. That is what is producing this violence.

The ninth lie is that
the violence is erupted continually because there’s no Palestinian state.
Palestinians have repeatedly refused to accept a nation-state for themselves.
They’ve repeatedly refused to accept it if it means accepting a nation-state
for the Jewish people alongside it. That was and remains the core of the
conflict - the persistent refusal to recognize Israel in any boundaries.

Now I spoke to you about my grandfather. After he
came here in 1920, we had the surge of the attacks at that year. In 1921, the
Jewish community in Hebron, who had been there for millennia, was massacred -
no provocation, no reasons. In 1936 to 1939, massive attacks by Palestinians on
the Jewish community here, throughout the coast - in Tel Aviv, Jaffa, elsewhere.
There were no settlements there, no territories, no desire even for a
Palestinian state. And this continued, of course, into 1947, ‘48, when the
Palestinians rejected a partition for a Jewish state and a Palestinian state -
no territories then, a state offered to them.

And then it continued in the attacks against us,
terrorist attacks by the Fedayeen and others in 1956. And in 1967, those
attacks, the desire to destroy Israel continued despite the fact that the West
Bank, Judea and Samaria, and Gaza were firmly in Arab hands. So it couldn’t
have been the reason for our attacks. Now we’re talking about a century, half a
century - from 1920 to 1967, that’s 47 years - where the attacks, the attacks
are going against us one after the other. Half a century and it’s clearly not
the core of the conflict. The core of the conflict was the desire to destroy
the Jews anywhere, without a state, and with a state without the territories
and without settlements.

Now, when we came into possession of Judea, Samaria and
Gaza, and when we came back to our ancestral homeland into these disputed lands
and built some communities, some settlements, we uprooted them according to the
book. They changed the narrative. After ‘67 what the Palestinians did is turn
the result of their aggression - our presence in those territories - into its
cause. And the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon made a decision with which I
disagreed.

They uprooted all the Israelis from Gaza, disinterred
the graves, gave the territory to Abu Mazen and he promptly handed it over to
Hamas under the force of their guns. Well, we didn’t get peace. We got
thousands and thousands of rockets hurled into our cities. And when we asked
Hamas, “Why are you firing these rockets on our cities? Is it to liberate the West
Bank?” And they said, “Yeah, that too, but it’s to liberate Palestine - Haifa,
Akko, Jaffa, Jerusalem of course.” That is what they said.

We turned to the others, to Abbas and the Palestinian
Authority and I said, “What about you? Are you willing to recognize the Jewish
state? You demand a nation-state for the Palestinian people. Assuming we solve
the problem of the border, of the settlements and so on, would you then be
prepared to recognize a Jewish state, a nation-state for the Jewish people?”
They hem and haw and basically say no because they’d have to give up the
fantasy of the so-called right of return because they have to end the conflict,
because they don’t want a state to end the conflict because they want a state
to continue the conflict and eradicate the Jewish state. This is what this
conflict has always been about. That’s what it’s about. You can’t deny the
facts. You can stick your head in the sand and be an ostrich, but we Jews do
not stick our heads in the sand. We see the territory, we see reality as it is
and we confront that reality.

And here’s the tenth, final
myth - and this is a doozer for some of you. This one shows how
persistent and absurd these myths are and this was common parlance for our
critics, for commentators, for political leaders, for the greatest news media
in the world and this was uttered day in, day out, every hour by the hour, by
the international community and even some here and even by our own people. And
they said this as though it was self-evident truth and here’s what it said: The
core of the conflict in the Middle East - conflict always in the singular - the
core of the conflict in the Middle East is the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Remember that one?

Now four years after the Arab Spring and the
convulsions that take place, the disintegration of Syria, the disintegration of
Iraq, the disintegration of Libya, the wars in Yemen, the chaos in the Sinai
and everything else that convulses North Africa and the Middle East from India
to the Atlantic, from the borders of India I’m happy to say to the Atlantic,
there is great convulsion. What’s that got to do with the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict? And the answer is: Nothing. Yet this was repeated over and over and
over again. There were two truths - this was one of them. The core of the
conflict was the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; and the core of the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict were the settlements. Neither one is true.

Now it’s evident. The first one is, you know, there
are still true believers - not many - walking about us, but they’re fairly
silent about the first one because when millions are displaced, when hundreds
of thousands are butchered, when every week in Istanbul now they had… in Ankara
they had 100 people die in one day and thousands die every month - thousands -
in Iraq, in Saudi Arabia, in the Sinai, in Libya. It’s patently absurd. And yet
people believe this. They believe this with religious fervor, I would say. I’m
talking about the West. Now they believe the settlement myth even though they
see it before their eyes. We left Gaza. We left every settlement - nothing. The
conflict continues. We offer a deal and we say, “Okay, assuming we solve the
settlement problem, what about the settlement called Tel Aviv? What about
Jaffa? Give up the ghost.” Nope.

The core of the conflicts in the Middle East is the battle
between early medievalism, very primitive, very violent, the forces of militant
Islam, and modernity. The core of the conflict, the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, is the persistent refusal to recognize a Jewish state in any
boundaries.There is no way to battle lies except to tell the truth. Any
attempt to forge peace based on lies will crash against the realities of the
Middle East, will crash against the rocks of reality. We look forward and we
say we want a real peace, a lasting peace, a peace where our long-standing
rights, the right of the Jewish people to live in their ancestral homeland as a
free and secure people - those rights are guaranteed.

We have no preconditions for entering negotiations.We have
foundations for a solution and we will be very firm and insistent on it. But
there is no limitation on our side for entering negotiations. Yet that too is
not being met by the other side. It has enjoyed a long pass, it has been given
a pass by the international community, the Palestinian Authority. They are not
held to their incitement. They’re not held accountable for the violence that
they foment all day, all night, every day, every month, on their Palestinian
social networks and this has to end. My government has taken very strong steps
to bolster our security, adding forces, giving them the means to do their job,
punishing people who blow up houses or blow up people, murder innocent people.
We do all that.

But I think the larger battle that we fight is the battle for the truth
and I urge every one of you to be a soldier in that battle. [Alan Dershowitz.
Wolf Blitzer.] We’ve withstood, in the last century, the many assaults
on our people. We came back to our homeland. We built our state. We’ve overcome
tremendous forces. Israel is a modern, democratic, progressive and powerful
state. We’ve withstood the attacks of terror, Palestinian terror, over the
decades and we’ll overcome this one too. But I believe that the biggest battle
we have to fight is the battle for the facts. The facts win over the fiction if
they’re repeated clearly, responsibly, firmly. This is what I ask all of you to
do for the sake of the Jewish state and for the sake of the Jewish people.